What is bingbot's user-agent string?

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36 (vendor-documented in Bing Webmaster help (“Which crawlers does Bing use?”; W.X.Y.Z is the current Edge version; a mobile variant exists))

bingbot

Q: What is bingbot?

bingbot is Microsoft's search-index crawler — it crawls proactively to build the search index the assistant cites in answers. Allowing it is how your pages become citable.

Microsoft · Search-index crawler · Updated 2026-07-19

bingbot is Microsoft’s search-index crawler — it crawls proactively to build the search index the assistant cites in answers. Allowing it is how your pages become citable.

User-agent string

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

Source: vendor-documented in Bing Webmaster help (“Which crawlers does Bing use?”; W.X.Y.Z is the current Edge version; a mobile variant exists).

Does bingbot respect robots.txt?

Respects robots.txt. Crawl rate is managed via Bing Webmaster Tools Crawl Control rather than crawl-delay.

Allow or block bingbot

# Allow (recommended if you want bingbot traffic)
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /

# Block
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /

Verifying it’s really bingbot

Forward-confirmed reverse DNS ending in search.msn.com, Bing’s Verify Bingbot tool, or the published IP list at bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json (Microsoft advises refreshing it daily). User-agent strings can be spoofed by anyone — identity claims are only trustworthy when the source IP matches the operator’s published ranges.

Fetch the published ranges and check a suspect IP against them:

curl -s https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json

What site owners should know

Microsoft documents no separate Copilot crawler — third-party lists claiming a “CopilotBot” are unsourced. Copilot answers draw on the bingbot-built index, so blocking bingbot removes you from both Bing search and Copilot. The surgical controls are Bing’s NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE meta tags, which limit Copilot-answer and training use while keeping normal search listings.

Scan your site to see how your robots.txt, content negotiation, and discovery files treat AI agents — including whether you’re blocking agents you meant to allow. Background: the robots.txt guide, how AI agents browse, and agent readiness.

All AI agent user-agents

ClaudeBot · Claude-User · Claude-SearchBot · GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT-User · PerplexityBot · Perplexity-User · Google-Extended · Google-Agent · Google-CloudVertexBot · Meta-ExternalAgent · Meta-ExternalFetcher · MistralAI-User · Applebot · Applebot-Extended · Amazonbot · bingbot · DuckAssistBot · CCBot · Bytespider